Hello and welcome back to the show, to Chasing Excellence.
I'm Patrick, here with Ben.
How are you, my friend?
I'm doing great.
Yeah, thanks Patrick.
Excited to have this conversation.
You have been, I guess, two things.
One, we introduced this idea of drift.
And I think, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think the word first came up when we were talking to Dr Rich in the episode.
I think we called it.
The default is decline.
And I know I think you guys had been talking about this idea of drift, but that was the first time.
It was like put into the waters here at the show.
And then I know recently you've been talking a lot about drift on like on social and stuff like that.
So I know you've been thinking about drift and I thought let's actually have a conversation about drift specifically.
Let's define it.
Let's talk about what it is, where it is and what we can do about drift.
And so I think I just want to start with maybe, your definition, how you've been thinking about drift, what it looks like, what it feels like, how maybe we can all start to identify it in our own lives.
And then I'd asked you to put together a list of like, here are the things that are creating drift.
So we're going to go through a list of 10 things that you sent me.
And then talk about, we're going to steal a word from our friend Chris Irwin.
We're going to talk about the countermeasures of those causes of drift.
So, but first, again, let's just define drift.
Like, what is it?
What are we talking about?
Why is it important?
How have you been thinking about it?
So how it like popped up onto my radar and how I started like thinking about it and leaning farther into it was I been really trying to explore?
And it started with comp train.
And as we're trying to redefine the new present and future of what we're trying to do, moving from, you know, trying to get athletes to pony but the CrossFit games to this forever athlete mentality.
And I was really trying to like because I always think this works really well for entrepreneurs is to truly personalize it.
I'm like, what is the problem I'm trying to solve for myself?
What is my fear?
What is my thing that CompTrain does for me?
And I wrestled with that for a very long time.
And I finally got to this idea.
It's like, it's not that I need better programming.
It's not that I want to be able to even PR my lifts.
It's not that I So what is this thing?
That is a true, Which would be the obvious things that comp training is doing for people.
Right, right, right.
But I like that.
Going even deeper than that.
So what is like the true... pain point that I have.
And what I, after lots of wrestling, started to formulate was this idea that I'm terrified of almost unknowingly losing my edge, losing my fitness, losing my health.
And I know it's not going to happen at one big abrupt moment.
It's not like I'm going to be the first day of the month kind of go.
You know, today's the day I'm going to stop going to the gym.
Like today's the day I'm going to start having desserts after lunch.
I'm finally going to start smoking cigarettes.
Yeah.
I think donuts are a good idea.
I know it's not going to happen that way.
So if it's not going to happen that way, what's the way that I end up unhealthy?
What's the way that I end up 75 and decrepit, or end up with a chronic disease, or end up not being able to keep up with my kids right?
And it's that I just sort of slowly start to and this is where the word came up drift, where I just take my eyes off a little bit, almost like you don't fall asleep.
I'm not going to fall asleep at the wheel, right?
But you kind of have those like.
You're sort of like You just like the car and you got to hit those rivets on the side of the highway.
Like, whoa, well, if those rivets aren't there, you're drifting and it gets really dangerous.
And that's where it is.
Like, I just like, maybe you sleep in a day.
You don't get up with your alarm.
You snooze.
You don't go to the gym that day.
You do start to have an extra little snack after dinner.
You do start to stay up a little bit later.
You do start to work a little more and not put the effort into your kids, your family.
And just this compounding effect of all those small little choices add up.
So I was playing with this for a lot.
Yeah.
While I ended up putting a whole like Ben does a whole sort of like document and campaign around it with imagery and all the rest.
And in the early days of getting to know Rich, we went out to dinner and He goes.
You know, what I've been thinking a lot about recently is drifting.
And I was like, we might be true soul brothers.
Did we just become best friends?
Yeah, did we just become best friends?
Because there's lots of room for activities.
I was like, it was just like this, wow.
And I literally took out my computer at dinner and showed him my whole document.
I was like, this is what I've been thinking about so much for the last six months.
So it was one of those little things.
He created a, he moved it forward for me, which was drift leads to dysfunction, and it is dysfunction that leads to disease.
And the true, awesome words he gave were any organization or organism left unattended to, meaning purposely not trying to move in the right direction, will experience entropy.
Yes.
I love that word.
Yep.
Right.
Which is they start to, by default, edge towards decline.
Yep.
If you don't take care of your body, if you don't take care of a team, you don't care for a government, a society, a roadway, a bridge all of those things will eventually start to decline.
And this pursuit of chasing what truly matters in our lives falls exactly into.
It's so awesome with this parallel with awareness, intention and action right.
It's just like that perfect parallel to it.
Yes, I love that.
And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have this conversation with you because, as you've developed, and I've just been sort of watching from the outside as well as obviously, you know, talking to Rich and whatnot
But as you sort of continue to develop this idea of drift, I realized oh, that's the conversation that we've been having for a while now.
We haven't labeled it as that.
We haven't said that's the enemy.
But in many ways, it is the enemy that we've been trying to counter for many, many years now.
I would say the majority of the conversation that we've had now, after we got past the sort of CrossFit Games, win the podium phase of the first couple of years of the show.
Yeah, it's the villain in our story.
Yes.
The hero's journey, what we are trying to overcome now is this drift.
And drift, it's not random, right?
And it's not accidental.
Drift is like a very structural thing that is embedded into our lives and our culture and our biology.
And here's like, Drift shows up in our lives in two different ways.
And they both have to do with Arthur Brooks' The Four Idols.
Oh, love.
Love any reference to Arthur Brooks.
Of course, right?
I'll do it the other way.
The first one is I think what most people think about.
When I first started sharing this with Jameson, Jameson was like okay, so it's about saying no to the cookies and it's about being lazy, and it's about the other Netflix show and
Yes, that is the first one.
And in Arthur Brooks' words, that is the pleasure one.
It's so easy, right?
There's so much comfort around us.
And if we aren't aware, that comfort will slowly drift us.
I think of this actually as the drift of being on a lazy river.
Right.
You're in an inner tube and you're just kind of drifting down.
If you don't consciously swim against the current, you end up where you don't want to end up, which is the pool of despair, if you want to call it that.
Right.
Really dramatic.
Yes.
So the first one is that the first current that we have is this pulling us is pleasure.
It's so tempting now to just keep scrolling.
It's a watch the next Netflix episode to stay up later to have the pleasure foods, to drink the alcohol.
And it's like... So for where he is, it's this... It's sort of like the lazy crowd, right?
And people are just drifting and you end up overweight and sick.
There is a... equally powerful.
And this is one that's more like where we are living in the Northeast, right?
With all of our hard chargers and super achievers, there's an equally powerful drift as well that we must be aware of as well.
And that is the other three idols put together, which is money, power, and prestige.
This is the conversation we've been having, right?
It's exactly this. that from the outside, those ones look like success.
But from the inside, they feel empty.
They create anxiousness.
You're never enough.
You will never get enough.
Chris Williamson's words are how many goals have we already achieved?
That, we said, would make us happy, yet the goalposts just keep moving.
So in this one we're moving fast, chasing more money, more power, more prestige recognition accolades, awards.
So it's not that we're not giving efforts.
We're just...
This is what we said before forever is our ladder is just leaning up against the wrong wall.
We're climbing, we're moving, we're putting effort into climbing it.
We get to the top and we go, oh, damn it.
Maybe I climbed the wrong wall.
I should be over there.
So in the first one, we choose comfort, convenience, and pleasure.
In the other ones, we're going after hard things.
Just not the right hard things.
Not the right things.
Yep.
Yeah.
Love that.
Okay.
So a couple of things to check on and then we're going to get to our list.
I think you should call it the pool of dysfunction and not the pool of despair, because that goes back to drift dysfunction disease.
So just kind of- Love it.
We end up in the pool of dysfunction.
And then you mentioned Jameson and you said something else.
And one of the things that Jameson has kind of introduced to us recently is this idea that anything over zero compounds.
Yes.
And I think when in this conversation of drift, I think anything under zero also compounds.
Right.
So anything it's the I'm going to hit the snooze one time today.
I'm going to skip the gym today, even though I was supposed to go.
I'm going to yeah, I'm going to eat that second piece of cake.
If we consider those actions under zero, those also compound just as much as I'm going to say no to the cake.
I'm going to get up when I said I did.
I'm going to get to the gym, even though I'm tired.
All of those things also compound in one direction, while the others compound in the other, in the negative direction.
That's so good.
And it might be that's kind of what that actually frames up even better, because I'm not looking to compound and like I'm not trying to beat my all time best mile time.
Yep.
I'm not trying to run another Ironman.
I'm not trying to compete at the CrossFit Games again.
I'm not trying to PR my back squat or clean and jerk.
I just don't want to do what you're saying, which is like compound in a negative way.
It's sort of like if you've created this.
Didn't we just talk about this recently with somebody else?
The 401k for like your health?
Yes.
Jordan Metzl.
I think of it that way, like in investing, one of the biggest things that we can do.
What's the most powerful thing you can do is never lose the principle.
Yes.
Right?
If you have $1,000 and you lose 50%, you now have $500.
Well, if you make 50% again, you only have $750.
So you've lost 50%, gained 50%, and you are net negative.
This is one of the big things.
If you're coming back from an injury, if you're coming back from time off, it's like just no steps backwards, because everything above compounds this way, but anything negative compounds equally, in the bad way as well.
So we truly, I think it's really good that you're framing up that way.
This is more about, less about going in chasing, right?
And just being like, hey, let's make sure we're not drifting.
We're not paying attention.
I gave this talk a while back and one of the participants afterwards came up and was like so he's one of the members of our gym.
Super high achiever, has exited multiple companies.
Is one of the youngest tenured professor at a, a really prestigious school here in the Northeast.
And he's like, I've realized like, so I haven't PR'd my back squat in like three years.
And by the way, he's like almost 60.
I haven't PR'd my back squat in like three years.
I'm realizing that I'm drifting.
How do I get back on track to where I can like start?
That's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's not what we're talking.
We're talking about is like, dude, you come to the gym six days a week and bust your ass.
Like.
That is so far the antithesis of drifting in terms of the training category.
We don't need to be PRing.
What this idea is like, you're on the highway driving forward.
Don't drift to the point where you crash into a tree.
That's slow, quiet, unconscious thing.
And here it is.
Modern life is, this is what it's set up for.
If we aren't like purposely hands on the wheel steering, we're going to drift.
There's too much convenience.
There's too much comfort.
There's too much stimulation.
There's too much profit incentivized into the way everything is created now that we are not designed to to have.
The environment around us is not designed to keep our strength, to keep our discipline, to work towards long-term fulfillment.
So we got to create the systems in place to make sure that we're doing that.
All right.
Let's get into our list.
Before we do, real quick, I love the word entropy.
And I had a conversation with an author named Rebecca Goldstein probably about a month ago.
She wrote a book called The Mattering Instinct.
And she introduces in that book a term that I've loved and I've thought about a lot since then counterentropic.
So actions that fight against entropy.
So that's what the list is that you put together for us.
These are counterentropic, or at least we're going to first talk about the creation of the entropy, what creates entropy, and then we're going to talk about what can be counterentropic as it relates to those.
So I just really want to quickly go through each one of these 10.
I want you to give us the two-minute version of what each one of these means, and then we'll do a deep dive and talk about all of them and the countermeasures to them.
So first one that you sent me, comfort everywhere.
We mentioned this a little bit, but comfort everywhere.
Yeah, it's obvious, right?
Like there's a book written about it called The Comfort Crisis, which is one of my top tens now.
But this is the idea is that we're in a crisis because there's too much comfort.
It's modern convenience has destroyed basically our ability to live healthy lives.
We've opted for convenience everywhere, right?
Number two, infinite digital distraction.
This is one of ours or certainly your favorites, right?
Yes, it is.
Which is your life is what you pay attention to.
That's like, if you think of it like framed that way, it's really cool.
Like We talk about frequency illusion and reticular activation system.
What you look for, you see more of.
It's Mark England's, it's the story you tell yourself.
Well, that's going to be based off of all of this info that we have everywhere.
So can we resist the distraction of the Where it's everywhere now.
Again, a lot of this stuff, this drift stuff didn't exist 200 years ago, right?
The convenience thing wasn't a real thing.
This distraction one wasn't a real thing.
So this is all fairly new.
A good amount of this list, you could probably say, is a relatively modern problem for us to solve.
Well, it makes sense though, right?
Because what we just said is drift leads to dysfunction, which leads to disease.
To classify that, what we mean by that is leads to chronic disease. not acute, right?
Not like you got a virus, not like you got poisoned, not like you contracted something like HIV, truly like a chronic disease which comes from your lifestyle and behaviors.
So that's really what it is.
It's the modern day lifestyle and behaviors lead to this dysfunction, which leads to disease.
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Number three is food engineered for addiction.
Yep.
Otherwise known as ultra processed food.
Yeah, it's just something we've talked about a lot.
So people that listen to our conversation a lot are going to go.
Yeah, like just nodding along because this is nothing new.
It's just framing it up in a new way.
It's food that our grandparents wouldn't eat or wouldn't recognize as food is what gets us to this, the bad place.
Sedentary default living.
Yeah, this kind of goes with the convenience one, right?
But this is our default.
It's like we wake up out of our beds.
We go down and sit at a table where we have crappy breakfast.
We get into our air-conditioned cars.
Where we're sitting again, to go to our desks, where we are sitting again, to go back to our cars, to go back to the dinner table, to go back to our bed.
Yep.
That is the normal life right now.
Yeah.
With a stop to the couch, probably between dinner and bed.
Yeah.
Right.
So this is where like, at least get people to be walking like, right.
And we can lean way more into this, but it's a, we were built to move.
Agreed.
Number five, sleep disruption everywhere.
It's weird.
Like even we went through this period where it was a badge of honor, right.
To, to not sleep.
I'm so busy.
I only sleep, you know, there was a saying like I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was like, and there's still a lot of this in the hustle culture, right?
Which is you can have your side hustle, like it's a job that you do after dinner from 10 to 2.
But yeah, it's just, it's part of it is societal.
Part of it is the other things, the distraction and the comfort and even the food plays into this.
But we all know that the power of sleep, the saying is movement is medicine.
Well, sleep is equally as powerful.
Agreed.
Next one, social comparison culture.
This is one that's probably not as obvious, right?
But this is what kind of gets us into the second three of the three idols.
Where we go?
God, I wish I had their cars.
Wow, I wish I had their body.
Wow, I wish I had their flying private.
Oh, my gosh.
And you get into this and you're like so it must be those things that create happiness, that create true.
And you chase those things at the detriment to our own health.
Number seven, overcommitment and busyness.
Same thing.
The idea is, it's not the pleasure seeking, it's the other ones, which is busyness, is a badge of honor and we're overcommitted.
I just recently was talking to another parent and we were talking about spring schedules starting up for the kids.
And he was like, what's Bodie doing?
Who's our 13 going on 14 year old.
I was like he's doing town travel soccer, which is going to have two practices a week and a game on the weekends maybe two, and strength and conditioning, which is four days a week.
And he's like, and what else?
I was like, well, the, That's it.
We used to have him on a couple.
I was like, what's Jake doing?
He goes, he's on three lacrosse teams.
I was like, whoa.
And he goes, Andy's doing strength conditioning three days a week.
I was like, whoa.
He's like, and baseball and flag football.
Six.
I was like, there is only seven days in the week.
So anyway, this is what it is.
It's like we're overcommitted.
We're over busy with everything.
It's not just schedules.
It's like emails, texts, go run errands, pay the bills.
Like, I got notifications coming out of the wazoo and I got to be up to the news on every single last little thing.
It's overcommitment and business, but it's also like overstimulation.
Yeah, oversimplification, that's a good word for it.
Number eight, loss of community.
It's amazing because we live in the most connected time in the world, right?
But it's also the least connected.
We've never had.
You know, I think for the first time ever in the last couple of years, isolation is considered one of the top causes of disease in America.
Mm-hmm.
It's a killer.
And if you listen to Scott Galloway, in terms of young male adults, this is a travesty.
This is a huge issue to the point where, and he's all about being strong, being healthy.
He's like I don't think men drink enough, because the upside of them going and hanging out at bars and getting loopy is actually net benefit than them being by themselves and not drinking.
It's kind of like that study that came out a while ago that smokers were actually end up being healthier than non-smokers, because when the anti-smoking campaign came out, They then had to like if they want to smoke, had to get up from their desks and walk outside.
And the walking and the socialization, those two things together actually was a net benefit to the detriment of what smoke.
It's kind of this.
Yeah.
It's like this loss of community that we have right now.
And people think that we think that we're connected because you are seeing what's happening on people's reels.
And it's goes back to the other earlier ones in this comparison.
Yep comparison and digital distraction and sedentary all of that stuff removes the possibility of connection and community because you think, and even overcommitment and busyness and overstimulation, all of those things take away from what used to be the gathering of people in a single place for a single purpose.
And that's one of the things that's being lost.
Number nine, normalization of mediocrity.
I like this one on the list.
Yeah, so like 80% of Americans have a chronic disease right now.
So it's like, okay, that's just normal.
That's not normal, right?
Being overweight is not normal.
Being any of the ones we've just listed overcommitted overbusy, having no community, being sleep deprived all of these things are not normal.
This is the crazy part.
It's now weird if you go to the gym five days a week.
It's now weird if you bring a bunch of cut up veggies to school for lunch.
Those are the normal things.
The weird thing is having lack of sleep, not moving your body and bringing these things that were made by guys in lab coats with like little test tube things as your food.
What was it?
I'm blanking on it.
Deviant something, deviant, deviant something.
We've talked about this before.
What was that phrase from?
I think Brian Johnson's Arete book highlighted it for us or for you.
Do you remember what that phrase was?
Yeah, it was the healthy deviant.
Healthy deviant.
Thank you.
Yes, I knew it was deviant.
I just love that phrase.
And that's kind of what we're talking about.
Last one on the list, then we're going to start talking about countermeasures.
Number 10, erosion of awareness.
Yeah, this is the one that buttons up our whole thing, right?
Is if you don't have awareness that you're chasing one of these four idols, you're going to fall prey to their power, because they are so powerful and they are everywhere.
And they're reinforced from like.
Basically, the day you have a consciousness right, the day you can accept stimulus and start to frame your view of the world, these are the things right.
This is what success looks like.
The first three, power, money, prestige, or hey, this is what's fun.
Like the birthday cake, the candy, and going to them, watching the Netflix and scrolling.
This is like chase pleasure.
We have to have awareness.
It always starts with that.
That's why it's step one of the addicts process.
Alcoholics and all this.
All right.
The mention of the four idols.
Again, it was Arthur Brooks introduced it to us, but they're actually from Thomas Aquinas.
Pleasure, money, power, prestige.
And I just remembered and we've mentioned him before mentioned him when we talked to Marcus recently.
We're going to talk to Jim Murphy soon, author of Inner Excellence.
And it just reminded me, he's got something called the affluenza virus, which is very similar to the four idols.
So i just want to give that one more time, because then we'll get into these countermeasures.
He writes this in inner excellence western culture exposes us daily to the quote affluenza virus, the most dangerous type of virus, one that can steal your soul.
This virus idolizes five things possessions achievements looks money, status.
These five symbols of success can steal your true dreams by getting you to focus on them instead of what's truly meaningful, empowering and permanent.
So again, we are fighting this drift And these countermeasures, these counterentropic principles.
We are trying to fight against the four idols or the affluenza virus.
Whichever one of those sticks with you, whichever one you can keep in your mind, is the one we're going to go with.
So let's jump into these 10 countermeasures that we've got here.
Let's go down through the list in the same order that we just went.
So the first current pulling us in the wrong direction, towards that pool of dysfunction, is comfort everywhere.
A countermeasure to that is to choose useful discomforts.
What does that mean?
So today comfort is just the default, right?
But what we know is that through any biological system, it grows and it improves when it's put through challenge adversity, hardship.
Without it, it does not get better.
So we need that.
So in order to be able to grow and do meaningful things... So let me back up.
What we're trying to do is not drift.
We want to get to the end of our lives and go...
I'm so glad with the decisions I made that end up where I am today.
And if we aren't doing that, we could get pulled down this current.
We need to swim against the current.
One of the ways we swim against the current is... do hard but meaningful things.
Yeah.
This past weekend, we know a lot of times we go skiing on the weekends in the winter.
This past one, we did not.
And I was just talking with Heather about this because we are going to go skiing this weekend.
One of the big reasons is Bodie.
Again, our 13-year-old kind of just sat on the computer and played this video game from afar, like they connect with all his buddies and he's talking to them.
It's so different than when we were doing it, but he sort of did that the whole day.
Yeah, At the end of the day I was like hey buddy, I know that you had a good time doing that.
But when you look back on today, you didn't do anything.
There was nothing there.
So there was just so much comfort in that. sitting on the couch with his iPad, playing this game.
But it's not going out.
And even if he had gone to the hill in the backyard and run up and down the hill 10 times, it sounds like almost meaningless, right.
But there's something to that.
You are building the system.
You are making the thing being your body, your mind, your emotional regulation better.
And we need to lean into things like that.
So the countermeasure is to this life of comforts, which will just erode us.
That's what it will literally do is talk about the entropy is to choose discomfort regularly.
The idea is, you know, like so many people talk about this.
It's kind of like, do hard things.
Alex Honnold talks about it in terms of like you know, when I climb this building or climb this wall, all of a sudden, when I get to the airport and my flight's delayed, other people are freaking out because it's the hardest thing that they've experienced.
So for them, this is like real fear, real anxiety, real challenge.
How do I handle this?
And we need to kind of like reset the regulator because there is no hard things in our lives anymore.
The hardest thing we have is like the morning traffic.
Yep.
Or the Bluetooth doesn't connect to our car and we can't listen to our favorite podcast.
So we have to artificially and intentionally manufacture this.
It's not hard things for the sake of hard things.
It's hard things because they make us a more resilient human being, capable of living a more meaningful life.
Yeah.
I mean, even if we just take a lesson from the gym, what is the thing that creates a stronger person?
It's resistance and it's friction.
That is the means by which a person gets stronger, a person gets fitter.
And so what we're saying is, you need to replicate that principle in real life.
You need to find places where resistance creates strength on the other end of the resistance.
And to your point, so much of our culture, so much of industry is built around convenience and reducing friction and reducing resistance.
That were lulled and trapped in a world that says you don't need to resist.
I'm going to take care of all the hard parts.
But then to your point, the flight gets delayed, or you're late to the flight, or there's traffic or whatever.
Any number of things like we can't avoid resistance.
We can't avoid friction.
All we can avoid is training for it so that when it comes, we can respond to it.
That's right.
Yeah, the responding to it is the huge part.
And the only way that we have the ability to respond to it is if we have trained for it.
You don't just have it.
You have to earn it.
And biology just tells us that it is through this friction, through this resistance, your words, which are awesome that we grow, we evolve and we get stronger.
And again, if what we're looking for is the good life, I can't imagine any scenario where the good life is a fragile one, where anything outside of
Your expected perfect future outcomes rattles you to the point where you can't control yourself.
There is so much research to show the association between people with high emotional control and their overall happiness in life.
Mm-hmm.
So it goes across the whole thing, right?
It's emotional, it's mental and it's physical.
And when we put ourselves through challenging things, all three of those harden, all three of those level up.
Basically, we are moving up levels in the building and it takes more and more of a flood to get us wet right.
To make us more uncomfortable.
Otherwise, you're just living at the bottom floor and be like, I hope it doesn't rain.
I hope it doesn't rain.
I hope it doesn't rain.
It's raining.
Oh my God.
And you like lose your mind.
Let's go to the next one.
Okay, so it was infinite digital distraction and the countermeasure is to guard your attention or, as we said before, own your attention.
Yeah.
I love your words for that.
It was like own your attention.
The average person checks their phone 96 times per day.
These huge tech companies have employed behavioral psychologists to maximize engagement, right?
So They've used the literally the same techniques.
That who talks about this, the slot machines.
It's scarcity brain.
Michael Easter.
That's Michael Easter again.
Yes.
Comfort crisis.
Same guy.
Yeah.
In his other book, Scarcity Brain, the first chapter is awesome.
They talk about how they use scarce slot variable rewards to basically keep people like the slot machines.
Were these kind of like afterthoughts at casinos?
This guy came in and totally changed it.
He hacked. human be psychology.
And slot machines became the most profitable thing in the casinos after he kind of figured this thing out.
Those are the same technologies that these digital companies are using to distract us. all the time.
And again, if I'm trying to think about the anti-drift, the swimming against the currents, like where do we not want to end up?
We don't want to end up as these zombies that are just constantly checking our phone With your hunched over shoulders, head down, oblivious to the rest of the beauty, magnificence and other things that we could be paying attention to outside of that.
Cal Newport does a phenomenal job of this in Deep Work and all of his other things.
Deep, what's his, The Deep Life?
Yep.
And it's not a matter of willpower, right?
If you're in there, you and I both are very disciplined people.
And we have to manufacture our own sort of environments to make sure that we don't do this, because we don't have the power to overcome these truly built-in biological mechanisms that are going to distract us.
So what we need to do is own our attention.
Your attention is your life.
So we need to actually go in and not use our willpower, but change the environment.
So you've seen like when you came over, I put my phone literally in a drawer when I get home.
So it's not in my pocket.
It's not on the table.
It goes away.
But I also do other things like in my Instagram feed, I go to my settings.
And in your settings, you can change it to where it only shows you people that you follow.
Okay. to where it's not giving you all these crazy new things.
You're like, oh my God.
So it's like the old school Instagram.
I was like, it used to be like, you're caught up.
Remember that?
Oh yeah.
That's what mine is now.
So I only, I follow less than 50 people at a time.
If it's one in, it's one out.
So I know that like, I'm not going to be on.
So if I do get on it, the most time I can kind of spend on it is like 10 or 15 minutes.
Because after I go through the thing, it's like, oh, I've seen everything that there is.
So you can manufacture it those ways.
But it's anything from Cal Newport's deep work, deep uninterrupted time.
This is your block to do this.
Similar is like not just work, but this is my time to be with my family.
I'm not going to be interrupted by these other things.
And it's really about, just like truly again, it's the last one the awareness of.
Are you drifting here?
Are you just kind of doing the default thing?
And the worst ones are like pretending not to, like scrolling underneath the table while you're at the dinner table with your family.
Yeah.
So two things.
I think the first is when you mentioned the number of times people pick up their phone.
I think you said 96.
I wonder if that is even too low.
That feels too low for me.
But one of the things I was going to say is one of the things that I track is the number of times I pick up my phone every day.
And my goal is to pick it up less than 30 times every day, which is easy once you get into it.
But if it's something that you don't pay attention to and you're just like oh, let me look at how many times I picked it up today, it will probably be in that 90 to 120 range.
How do you find that?
It's the same place, at least on iPhones.
It's in the same place where you can see your screen time.
Exact same place, settings, whatever.
I forget now because it's so automatic to me to look at it.
But it's probably just called screen time still.
But you can look at how many times you've picked it up.
My goal is under 30.
I think it's doable to do under 40, but I think it's worth looking at.
And then the second thing kind of goes back to the first thing we talked about, which is comfort.
I think so many times when we willingly distract ourselves because we would rather do that than suffer from the slight discomfort of sitting in our own head for more than a minute.
If we're in line, if the kids run off to play something, if there's a commercial on the TV, we're like well, I don't want to think about anything.
And so let me distract myself with another scroll, with another video, with another thing, so that I don't have to think.
And I think that that ultimately is a bigger problem than almost anything else.
It's our inability to sit and just be with ourselves in our own heads that create, and it's because we've trained ourselves to fight against and resist against discomfort.
So back to the first one.
Again, it's such a good call.
The thing we're fighting against here is this infinite digital distraction.
The countermeasure to that is to own your attention, because if you don't decide where your attention is going, you're allowing someone else to.
This should actually probably be like, awareness should probably be the first one.
It should probably be the second one, right?
It's like, have your own level of awareness, your own scorecard.
Don't let someone else put it there for you.
And then don't get distracted.
Yes.
And then comparison should probably be the next one.
We should redo these.
We should redo this.
Let's not.
We're having this conversation.
Let's keep with our original list though.
Number three was food engineered for addiction.
And a countermeasure is, as we've talked about a lot, eat real food.
So ultra processed foods now account for 60% of the calories consumed in the United States.
So many people have said like this, but processed foods are not real food.
Robert Lustig, he calls it processed food is not real food.
It's a science experiment.
Michael Pollan says man-made food-like substances.
They are edible.
They have calories in them, but they are not food.
When I read In Defense of Food, that was the first nutrition book I ever read when I started getting into fitness and training.
My mom gave it to me for my birthday, my super early 20s.
And when I read that line, it changed everything.
That's when I got into paleo.
And I ate only paleo.
I think for like pretty hardcore, for like close to like eight years, to the point where, like I wouldn't even have salad dressing.
I didn't have a – because it rattled me so much.
Like this is not food.
It's a man-made food-like substance.
I'm not saying go to that extreme, but have the awareness –
If 60 EC has this great kind of graph that I go back to all the time, which is people are constantly trying to debate what's the right diet.
Is it macros or is it carnivore?
Is it vegan?
Is it intermittent fasting?
Is it paleo?
Is it zone?
Debating whether it's all the small little, the majoring and the minors.
And-
She has like the top 20 sources of calories in the United States.
And the number one source of calories in the United States.
Have you seen her, this post?
Do you know what I'm going to say?
I think you're going to say grain-based desserts.
Is that what it is?
You're exactly right.
The number one source of calories in the United States is dessert.
It's unbelievable, right?
Of course, like we're not going to, like we get to get all up in arms about all these other tiny little things when that's where we're getting our food is from, like cakes and danishes.
And I don't know, grain-based pies.
What else is a grain-based dessert?
Bread pudding.
Bread pudding is so good.
I didn't have bread pudding until I was like 41 years old.
It sounded disgusting.
You remember the exact day.
I didn't know exactly when it was.
I know where it was.
So good.
Yeah.
It was on my birthday at the Capital Grill 23 in Boston.
And they were like, you should try this.
I was like, oh my, what is this?
So modern foods, they exploit our biology, right?
They become addictive.
They're super calorie dense.
They're super nutrient deficient.
Just like the infinite digital distraction people have.
The most powerful companies in the world are now them.
And they have people that are paid.
They get paid by the amount of minutes and seconds your eyeballs are on there.
The food is the same thing.
Trillion dollar industry.
By the way, Philip Morris came in and they They didn't totally go away.
They came in and RJ Reynolds same thing the two biggest tobacco companies in the world when they started getting prosecuted by the US government, they didn't just like fold.
They're like, okay, where should we go?
And they started buying up food companies and they're using the same tactics that they did then now with us, but with food.
They're trying to make it more addictive, so we buy more of it.
It's a profit game.
That's why I said in the beginning it's like all these things that are driving us.
If we're not paying attention, it's not for the goodness of us.
They're not putting...
Fruit Loops extra vitamin C, Because they're trying to make us healthier.
They're trying to get us to buy the next thing.
The perfect amount of crunch and sweet and what it feels on your tongue.
They literally have Petri dishes in their laboratories of taste buds.
And they feed the taste buds different concoctions to see which ones they respond to the best.
That's the game that they're playing.
Yeah.
So yes, if we're not food that engineered for addiction, what is the countermeasure to that?
Could not be simpler.
Could not be harder. eat real food.
Whether you go paleo or you go ancestral, which now brings in things like bone broth and fermented foods, or you go CrossFit, eat meat vegetables nuts seed, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.
It doesn't matter whether you go keto or vegan.
All of those are still, I'll be careful with the vegan one.
Cause you can vegetable based.
I want to say I don't want to say plant-based, because most of that is not real food, but if it roamed the earth or grew out of the ground, that's real food.
That's one of the most powerful swimming against the current decisions we can make. right?
It is everywhere.
It is so powerful.
Food, who says it?
I'm blanking on everybody's names today.
I can see their faces.
Food is information.
It is literally telling your DNA what to do.
So if we eat real food, it's telling us to do all the good things versus genetics, versus epigenetics.
Your health is determined majority-wise we just had someone else on that was talking about this that is upwards of 60 75 of your health is determined by your behaviors and what you're telling your DNA to do, not just actually the DNA.
There might not be a bigger one that we can take control of.
That is so hard to do and be countercultural to than the food that we're eating.
And that conversation was Jordan Metzl as well.
It was the 60%.
Amazing.
Okay.
More shout outs to Jordan.
Yeah.
Next one.
Sedentary default living and the countermeasure is to train your body.
So we talked about this when we kind of went through the list of these, but we don't move anymore.
Our bodies are built, literally the human body as most mammals were built to move for sure.
And us more than a lot of others as well, just kind of put that out there.
It's like the reason we were able to start to grow as much as we were is because we started to be able to eat protein.
The reason we were able to do that is because we were able to outrun, literally run, longer than gazelles could or deer could.
We could outrun them.
Like this is part of what we do bipedal and we can sweat glands and we can just kind of out, exhaust everybody.
We move.
Persistence hunts.
That's what those were called, right?
Persistence hunts.
Awesome, Patrick.
What was that book years ago?
It was Born to Run.
I'm going to blank on the guy's name, but he introduced to the common vernacular the idea of persistence hunts.
Yeah.
And this is what we need to move.
So we have this kind of like framework, this hierarchy, which goes like sedentarism is sickness.
And we want to move up.
The next one is movement.
Movement is medicine.
You're either sick or you're getting medicine.
Above that is exercise.
Go to the gym, lift weights, get on a treadmill, do a spin class.
Above.
That is training, training for a specific outcome.
Try to run a 10K, run a marathon.
Be able to do 10 pull-ups back.
Squat your body weight five times like train for a specific thing.
And then above training, so sedentary, movement, exercise, training, above that is well-rounded.
Mm-hmm.
So you now are strong, you are now mobile, and you now have an engine.
That is where the best health outcomes reside.
The punchline to that is sedentary sickness, movement is medicine.
We got to at least be moving.
And we now go from bed to chair, from chair to car, from car to desk, back to, and it's like there's nothing.
This is why can we at least please be getting 10,000 steps?
And it's not that there's magic to the 10,000 steps.
It's not like 10,000 steps gives you kicking ass into your 90s.
This is the first prerequisite.
It's kind of like, hey, just don't overdose yourself with processed sugar.
Like if you're doing sugar and alcohol at every meal, everyone's probably like, Ooh, got it.
Well, it's the same thing.
Like the countermeasure is at least move, but we'd love to do even more than that.
The true thing is well-rounded training.
That means work.
Lift some weights, go for runs, and move your body through full ranges of motion.
Even better, do all that and play some sports along the way.
Number five, we've got sleep disruption everywhere is what we're fighting against.
And the countermeasure is, of course, to protect your sleep.
How do we do that?
There's all the different things that we can talk about.
I think that we've talked plenty of times on the show about Sleep is not a weird one to talk about when we talk about health now.
Just to back up a little bit, it really was...
15, 20 years ago.
This was not on people's radar from the turn of to the 2000s, from leaving the 90s.
No one was talking about sleep as a big factor for your health.
Even before that, the one before that was training.
No one was talking about exercise about that.
And even before that, food wasn't the thing.
Yeah.
So it's cool that this is coming into the normal culture, but the idea is to protect it.
And I've really started to, of all of the ones, this is, I actually find this one to be the hardest.
Hmm.
It's the easiest to do.
Heather talks a little time.
She's like, it's the easiest.
She's like, you just have to, you have to go to bed.
Like there's nothing, you don't have to do anything.
You just go to bed.
Yeah.
And it's actually the, it's actually the one that we get to lean into comfort the most.
It's the one we should ramp up the comfort.
And she's so right because like training is hard, right?
It's like, but in terms of what it actually?
The other ones are sort of like you're giving something up.
Like I'm not going to eat the sweets.
I'm not going to scroll on my phone.
I'm not going to eat the.
You know what is.
I'm not this one's.
You have to, like sort of, I think, change your lifestyle.
Yeah.
So when we started paying attention to this as people that were trying to really optimize our health, I was very consistently getting underneath seven and a half hours of sleep.
And there was probably 20, 30% of the nights I was under seven.
Mm-hmm.
And it took us probably two years to get to the point where our new norms now are where we want them to be.
And the reason is lots of things had to change that I used to take the 630 am class and our kids used to have practices that ran late.
So by the time those two things happen, you're going to bed closer to 10 o'clock and you're getting up closer to five 30.
Right.
And that's seven and a half hours.
But when you start tracking your sleep, it might take you that's lights out to lights on.
Yeah.
It might take you 15 to 20 minutes to fall asleep.
And then when you start to really track it with a wearable, you realize lights out to lights on is not actual sleep time.
It's upwards of an hour that you lose during that time.
So our new default now is nine to six, which is nine hours.
So now the worst that we're going to end up with is closer to eight hours.
And that's where our new.
But it took us a long time to redo that because you can't just go like.
Well, instead of the six 30 class, I'm going to take the eight 30 class.
Like every morning meeting has like literally my team has to rearrange everything for that.
And then for Bodie's practices and Harley's practices to get out on time.
We have to literally determine which sports we're going to be a part of.
But this is what I mean.
It's probably the easiest, but the hardest.
Yeah.
And you've also got to figure out.
Okay, what does that meal for mean, for meals like timing, and when do I do it?
And if I'm going to work out at this like we talked about this, I think, when we did our five factors review at the end of last year, it's like Everything is related, because once you start moving one logistically, everything else sort of needs to move in line with it.
Otherwise, it's going to be a point of failure, right?
To your point.
You can't be like, from now on, I'm sleeping from 8pm to 7am but then change nothing else.
It's like, well, something's going to fall apart, right?
And so it's like you've got to take this, especially as it relates to like what we're talking about here in the five factors, like they are all so interrelated that once you start moving one, you've got to say okay, what is the downstream effect?
If I do that, then what happens to this, this, and this?
And what do I need to change over there to make sure that this is possible and that those don't get lost as well?
And so that's why I mean, that's why I love these conversations, because I think it's so easy to have these, these conversations about health or fitness or whatever optimization, as though they're just one thing.
Right.
We just got to do this one thing and then everything is solved.
But if you've tried that, and we've tried that, you and I have been doing this for so long, like we've tried all the little hacks and the tricks and the over optimizations in any one area.
And you recognize like they fall apart unless you're looking at it as a whole.
Absolutely.
It's everything is so interconnected.
It's we've talked before.
It's not like slices of a pie.
It's like a big stew.
You can't pull one piece out.
Right.
It's all the same.
But I think it's the big thing is?
You know, we talked about this recently with I think it was Jordan Metzl as well.
Man, I realized how much came out of that.
But it's like knowledge, belief, emotion.
Yep.
That's him.
Yep.
Right?
And this just popped up.
I actually journaled about this yesterday morning because I was like so in awe of it.
I was – as Heather was taking a late shower after dinner, and while she was doing that I had already brushed my teeth and put on – pajamas and I was like ready for bed.
I was laying in bed and I was just mindlessly scrolling through social, through Instagram, and Bodhi was doing it with me, and it's actually was a cool moment, because we both like a lot of the same things.
Right, my feet is full of like ski videos and And business and fitness stuff.
And he's way into all three of those things.
And we're doing it.
And after maybe watching three things or something like that, 90 seconds or so.
He's like Dad, we got to go to bed.
Put that down.
I was like, whoa.
This is a 13-year-old and we're laying in bed.
And I was like...
So I went to bed with him.
We take turns who we snuggle with every night.
I was with him that night.
We're laying down and I'm like, dude, I'm just so impressed that you want to go.
He goes, yeah.
He goes, he goes, yeah.
You know what?
Like when you're doing it, it's so like, it feels so good.
But then when you wake up in the morning and and you've lost a half hour of sleep, that doesn't feel good.
I was like, dude, you don't know how amazing that is, what you just said.
Yeah, because most adults haven't connected those two things.
I hadn't connected like I was doing it, but I know the reason he's doing this is because he has the knowledge.
And it doesn't because the knowledge, because it's because he does our comp, train youth strength and conditioning program where we talk about Heather talks about four days a week, talks about these things.
So he's now done this and he's heard the sleep talk hundreds of times about why it's so important that it is ingrained into him, the same way that having good manners at your friend's house is ingrained into somebody.
Yeah, it's normal.
The same reason why you brush your teeth is ingrained into somebody.
It's a part of his accepted cultural norms now.
It's like, that's so different.
I'm so jealous.
It's so awesome. that that's there.
I love that.
Last thing on the sleep thing is just, it was actually introduced to me through Brian Johnson.
I don't even know.
I was watching some other interview he did as we were preparing to have him on the show.
This is heroic Brian Johnson.
Yeah, heroic Brian Johnson.
And he just was like, I practice digital sunset, which I was like, I just love that phrase.
And so since I heard that, I've done the same thing.
I practice a digital sunset.
At 7.50, my watch goes off.
I have a little alarm set.
7.50, my watch goes off.
And that means whatever I'm doing, I've only got 10 more minutes of screens left.
Like if I'm watching TV, if I just happen to be on my phone, whatever.
Then at eight o'clock, phones, screens go away.
And then I'm usually in bed by nine o'clock.
And so just the practice of a digital sunset has this is relatively recently, I think we talked to him a couple months ago has been really, really helpful to say after this screens are gone.
Screens are off.
And then of course, as I've talked about before, no screens in the bedroom at all.
So, like those two things, those two hard and fast rules, for me is probably the key way that I attempt to protect sleep.
I think those words are the big ones, like protect sleep.
Yeah, I do too.
Yeah, I love that.
It's really the powerful part is you have to, if you don't, it won't be there.
It's just, there's just too much drift.
There's too much current pulling us away from it.
It's just everywhere.
It'll eat away at every part of it.
You have to really and maybe for someone else.
I don't think this is you or I, but this is certainly a real thing.
It's not the lights out to lights on.
They might be fine with that, but then they go lights out and they stare at the ceiling.
Yep.
For two hours.
And that situation we have to figure out.
What is the other things that we're going to do?
To unwind, to like kind of get ourselves to dysregulate or to get ourselves out of that sympathetic state to where we can actually do what we're supposed to do?
Yeah, what are we ruminating about?
What are the stories we're telling ourselves, right?
It gets into all of those mindset pieces.
And this goes back to where you were talking before.
It's the digital addiction, right?
If you're spending every waking moment you have there, you're not allowing your brain to process things right during the day.
You're not actually having that boredom.
You're having this thought experiment of like, hey, what about this?
And thoughts coming in and going out.
So that when your brain actually gets that chance, It's when you're laying on your pillow.
It's like okay Patrick well remember, there's this and then there's this and we got to remember this.
And what happened here today?
And did you think about this yet?
And they're like, it's, we got to be able to give ourselves that space in the day.
So again, it's the soup.
It's not the pie.
These things are all intertwined.
And it's also back to the training analogy.
Obviously, we talked about actual training, but we talked about it as a means by which we test ourselves against resistance and then get stronger because of that resistance.
In the same way, when we never down-regulate, when we never turn things off, when we never turn all of the distraction off, our brains can never actually recover.
And therefore, all day long, we're just constantly putting more in there and more in there, and more inputs and more stimulation.
And then we get to the end of the day, we turn everything off and the lights go off and we're staring at the ceiling.
And that's the moment our brain's like, okay, let's fix all these problems now.
Or let's Let's start now to unwind and relax.
It's like, it's too late then.
It's too late then.
You miss all of the opportunity to turn all the noise down throughout the day.
And now's the moment.
It's the first moment you've given your mind a chance.
And so, of course, it's going to take it there.
And it's like, well, no, that's the wrong time.
That's the wrong time to recover from the natural stresses of a day.
All right, let's keep going through our list because we don't have too much time left.
We are on number seven.
Number seven was overcommitment and busyness.
And the countermeasure is build structure.
Yeah, so the default is we're going to be.
It's kind of what I'm talking about with Bodie's schedule, right?
Yeah.
Or the person that signed up for the six different teams.
Oh my God, it stresses me out just thinking about it.
Yeah.
Busy is sort of a cultural sign of success, right?
Because you have a lot of things to do.
It means that you must be successful.
But that isn't the case.
Like in terms of like again, when we look back on our lives, What we want to do is not follow the norms.
The norms are the drift of the cultural currents that lead us to the pool of dysfunction, which is where we are going to end up being sick.
So what we want to do is have this structure.
And the way that Cal Newport does this incredibly well, And there's other people that have talked about this.
Stephen Covey does it as well.
Where it's the busy, people have to-do lists and they're constantly trying to check things off and get through their to-do list, which never ends.
That's overwhelm, whereas the more productive people schedule their days, but the most productive people schedule their weeks, and they schedule their weeks in time blocks right.
And if we have time blocks allowing ourselves for yes, all of the errands and busyness of the days that we have to do, but there's also time for deep work and meaningful connections and the things that if we don't prioritize, we'll fall off of those lists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's that distinction between things that are urgent and things that are important.
If we never do the work of identifying what are the important things and what are the urgent things, we will always default to the urgent things, because the urgent things are often easier to solve or do than the important things.
The important things are slower.
And there's less of a quick feedback loop as to like, oh, cool, I did that.
I checked that off my list.
And so again, if we don't have a plan, we will revert to whatever's easiest, whatever's loudest, whatever's the biggest, whatever's causing the most disruption.
We'll try to solve that one first.
With the urgent versus important, this is the difference between intentional versus unintentional.
Yeah.
Right?
If you just kind of like let the calendar fill up with whatever, that is reactive.
Whereas what we want to do is be completely very intentional.
And this is where we get to things like protecting our mornings, protecting our sleep.
This is where we get to things like I'm going to meal prep.
I'm going to create the time to create a healthy shopping.
I'm going to do the set up, the training, all the things that we know.
In big air.
Quotes are important, but just get pushed aside.
It's one of the words that we've used in the past, which is like what if training was the?
Or health was the first priority of our lives?
What's the operating principle?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's what if it became the default?
What if it was the first thing we focused on?
The organizing principle.
That's what it was.
What if health was the organizing principle?
Yeah, what if we started there, right?
And, by the way, for us, health as well is living with your heart on fire, doing meaningful things.
Connection, getting outside.
It's not just broccoli, grilled chicken, and squats and pull-ups, right?
Those are small pieces, but it's not the whole pie.
Yeah.
What if the default operating system was for this?
You know, it's also what inner excellence and the best possible life which we're going to very top of mind for us, because we're both reading it right now.
Yes.
I also thought about essentialism Greg McKeown's book on essentialism because that's so much of being busy and overcommitted is really just an act of not choosing what's important and letting the world choose what is important for you.
And so I think being overcommitted and being busy is often the result of Not knowing what you're trying to do, not knowing why you're trying to do it, and then letting the world, letting the universe, fill in your day, fill in your schedule, instead of you filling it in, instead of you being the architect of your day, letting the universe be the architect of your day and hope that you get somewhere you'd like to get to.
The architect of your day.
Let's keep on rolling.
Find your crew is the countermeasure to number eight, which is loss of community.
Humans evolved in tribes.
We shared our struggles.
We shared our standards.
We shared our identities.
Those things shaped our behaviors.
Modern life is anything but that, right?
It's incredibly individualistic and isolated and lonely, which created a health epidemic.
The countermeasure is to build your crew.
We formulated this like little taglines on the back of our shirts, which is surround yourselves with people that want to see you win.
Those that challenge you and call you out, but with no gossip, no negativity, just good vibes and growth.
If you have that, if that is what's around you, well then excellence and intentionality becomes more of the norm and not the exception, because the exception right now is so far from that.
And this kind of goes into the next one, right?
Which is, the normalization of mediocrity.
Right.
And part of that is because of who we surround our, who's around us.
Yep.
So, if we are able to put ourselves in with the people and that pursue excellence, that live counter-cultural, that prioritize the most meaningful things in their lives and hold themselves and the people around them to high standards, what is the most likely outcome for you?
Yeah.
If you go back to that metaphor of the lazy river, are you surrounding yourself with people who don't get on the lazy river, who get out of the lazy river or begin swimming upstream from the lazy river?
And if you do, it will be far more likely that you will then do the same.
And it will be far more likely, if you do it, that the people that you're surrounded with will also do it.
And so we have this influence on each other.
The people around you influence you and you influence the people around you.
And so it's like, what is normal in those relationships?
What is normal?
In the same way that like... which I love the, you know, Bodie saying, Hey, we should go to bed.
Right.
It's because that's normal in your house.
It's not because he woke up one day.
I was like, you know what?
Sleep is really important.
And as a 12 year old, I'm really going to start to optimize and prioritize my own sleep.
No, it's because you and Heather make it a priority.
You talk about it.
It is in the water there at the house.
It is normal.
And so therefore, he acted in accordance to what is normal.
It just so happens that that normal is wildly abnormal everywhere else in the world.
But in the confines of your house, between the four walls, it is as normal as to your point saying please and thank you right.
So that's what we're talking about is how can we surround ourselves with people who help us make it normal to not be mediocre?
And the countermeasure to normalization of mediocrity is hold personal standards.
I think these two things are so related.
Find your crew, hold personal standards.
Find a crew that creates and helps you hold high personal standards for yourself.
I think that's the thing.
Yeah.
That's probably what everything, this probably should be number one, right?
It really, it starts with what is the expectations for yourself?
Yep.
And, you know, Jim Rohn has this saying, which is don't join the crowd.
The crowd is lost.
The crowd is wandering.
Yes, I love that.
For real.
And what this means is the crowd is drifting.
Don't join the drift.
And what you've said is that awesome visual.
If you're going down a lazy river, everyone's on their inner tube.
But if the 20 closest people to you, imagine there's a thousand people going down, right?
But if the 20 closest people to you jump off their inner tubes and start swimming for the shore, you're kind of like oh wait, all my buddies are going to the shore.
Maybe I should go to the shore.
Whereas if all your closest friends are like not only just drifting, but they're sipping pina coladas as they're doing it.
The chances of you jumping off and swimming to the shore is probably... Yeah.
It's also Sometimes we can also be the ones to show somebody that it's possible to swim to the shore right.
Sometimes we don't even recognize... oh, that's a possibility.
Oh, I am actually making a choice here.
And my choice is to drift casually down this lazy river.
But oh, Ben just jumped out of the inner tube and he's swimming now.
I didn't even think about that.
Why is he doing that?
Can I do that as well?
So I think it's also really important when we find our crew, because our crew is the one who can also expose us to what we're not seeing, what we're not doing, what we are capable of and where our potential may lie.
Without the crew, without the right crew, we might just be all making ourselves drift further and faster.
Yeah, that's right.
And to go back to what this one is specifically though, just to kind of double down on this the countermeasure to the normalization of mediocrity is to set non-negotiable personal standards.
So decide what normal means for you.
That means like normal means...
Going to the gym six days a week.
Normal is eating real food.
Normal is protecting sleep.
Normal is being present and around people I care about as the normal and not being on my phone.
And then also doing what Brian Johnson talks about is like it's easier to be 100 than it is to be 90.
Yes.
When you're at 90.
Every single moment is now a decision of like am I going to go to fast food today?
Am I going to go fast food today?
Am I going to go fast food today?
As opposed to like, I don't go to fast food.
That is setting a non-negotiable past personal standard.
It's just easier to be there.
The other part about this is which goes to the normalization of mediocrity.
Is everyone, if we're shooting for average?
That's not a safe place.
That's the average of the middle of a completely broken system.
So we have to, again, the normalization of mediocrity and mediocrity is sick.
Last one, of course, is a big one.
Probably could do a whole episode on this, but it is.
The original was erosion of awareness and the countermeasure is practice reflection.
So let's do this quickly with a nod to the fact that we could talk.
Here's my quick one.
Yeah. awareness, intention, action to everything that we do in life.
It all starts with awareness.
The only way we do that is by popping up out of the default operating system which is programmed into us from all of the stuff from society, from news, from schooling, from biology, from everything that we've done is pop up and go wait a minute.
If I zoom out and If I journal about this, if I create space, if I'm able to kind of think thoughts and challenge my thoughts metacognition this is the biggest way to get out of the drift.
The drift is living countercultural.
We have to have awareness of actually what is most important to us and not just float.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before you go.
First, if you want even more from this episode, go check out the full 531 breakdown.
We give you the five big ideas from the episode three, reflection questions to help you process it all and one key takeaway that you can put into action right now.
The link is in the show notes.
The second thing, while you're there, check out The Chase Club.
It's our premium membership, where we include bonus content, ad-free episodes and a brand new chase tracker app.
Check it all out at chasingexcellence.email.
